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Ask HN: Is my project worth pursuing?

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Ask HN: Is my project worth pursuing?

#1

Post by dholowiski »

I've been working on a project: localbeer.me - for just over a year (on and off). It started off with the idea of finding 'beer brewed near me'. The idea is if you are in a strange city you can pull up the site and find some locally brewed beer. There are many beer/brewery databases, but the foundation of my idea is that it geolocates you, and the brewery, and lots of cool things can happen because of that geolocation. Now I'm branching out into geolocated brewery news and even geolocated brewery tweets.

Traffic is at about 20 visits per day, and I'm about 1/3 through the massive data entry project of entering every brewery and beer in north america (then, the world) and I'm having serious doubts as to whether it's worth continuing. Pretty soon, I'll have to start spending money on graphic design, promotion and better servers. I'm not ready to start promoting the site until the brewery database has more data, but that's going to take months - months I could be working on some other project.

So I'm asking for HN's honest opinion. Graphics design and Data completeness aside, do you see some nugget of value in this project? What would you do if this was dumped in your lap? What have you done when you've been faced with a similar decision?

Re: Ask HN: Is my project worth pursuing?

#2

Post by Pyrodogg »

> but that's going to take months - months I could be working on some other project.

Then get someone else to do it. Is there anyway you could automate the brewery discovery and addition process such that you could distribute the actual thought process work through something like Mechanical Turk?

It's just the first that occurs to me reading through your post. If you could offload that task to machines/other people you could focus on more value-add features, moving the project forward.

Re: Ask HN: Is my project worth pursuing?

#3

Post by dholowiski »

Pyrodogg wrote: post #2

> but that's going to take months - months I could be working on some other project. Then get someone else to do it. Is there anyway you could automate the brewery discovery and addition process such that you could distribute the actual thought process work through something like Mechanical Turk? It's just the first that occurs to me reading through your post. If you could offload that task to machines/other people y…

For sure... I could go the mechanical turk route, and have thought about it many times, but that is a $ investment. I could start scraping the other directories, but there is both an ethical issue there ('stealing' content?) as well as development time required to do that. It is set up right now so that anybody can add information, but without the critical mass of users that's just not happening.

And that's the thing. I have no problem spending the time or money needed on this project, if it's worth it. I'm just worried that I've gotten so mentally invested in it that I can't think critically about it's future. Of course I think it's an awesome idea, but a year of essentially flat traffic seems to be telling me otherwise.

Re: Ask HN: Is my project worth pursuing?

#4

Post by mikeocool »

I like the idea of being able to figure out that beers are brewed near by. But the data entry piece sounds a little arduous for the result.

Have you thought about crowd sourcing it? Maybe make localbeer.me a giant google map with all the breweries you've entered so far on it and the have a super simple form that lets people add their local breweries and their beer offerings. I feel like I know some hardcore craft beer drinkers who'd totally be into dropping in their favorite local breweries.

In the long term, you're going to have keep all the data you've entered by hand updated, and it seems like crowd sourcing would be a good way to get that info anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Is my project worth pursuing?

#5

Post by dholowiski »

mikeocool wrote: post #4

I like the idea of being able to figure out that beers are brewed near by. But the data entry piece sounds a little arduous for the result. Have you thought about crowd sourcing it? Maybe make localbeer.me a giant google map with all the breweries you've entered so far on it and the have a super simple form that lets people add their local breweries and their beer offerings. I feel like I know some hardcore craft bee…

Yes, see my comment below. Users can already enter breweries/beer. Maybe it's just as simple as making it easier/more obvious.

Re: Ask HN: Is my project worth pursuing?

#6

Post by MPiccinato »

I have been working on Had That Beer, www.hadthatbeer.com/signup?c=earlyaccess to check it out, for about 8 months now. I am the sole developer, designer, admin etc. I know the pain of all the manual data entry that has to be done for beers and by the time you are done a new batch of something else has been brewed and you are out of date. I would go through select geographic areas, get as many beers in as you can and start promoting it in that area. Best way to get feedback is to get users, and some of those users might not mind helping add a few brews.

I think your project is definitely worth pursuing. If you don't think so then maybe we could team up.

Re: Ask HN: Is my project worth pursuing?

#7

Post by tg3 »

I think it does have value, but a few things that struck me as "must dos":

- make it better for mobile, since that's likely the platform I'll use in a strange city. Maybe this is part of the graphic design piece that you were talking about.

- make it easier to see ALL the breweries/beers near me. I would think that would be the main page instead of one at a time (I hate refreshing the page)

If this project was dropped in my lap, I would do this:

- work on UX above all else (and before data entry). Make it easy and enjoyable to see what breweries are near me and to add breweries and beers.

- focus on a single geographic area for data entry. I'm in Chicago, so I would make this a killer website to visit if you're visiting Chicago. Promote it heavily in Chicago (Facebook ads is super targeted and great for something like this, you can target beer drinkers ages 21 - 40 in Chicago only, and might even be able to narrow it further).

- Let users add content for additional cities if it becomes popular in your homebase. Remember, we already made it really easy to do that in step 1.

- I might even look into signing up bars to be listed on the site as carrying a particular beer/brewery when a user is near their location. In exchange they put up your flyer. Free promotion if the functionality is there.

I think there is definitely value here, but I would devote some serious time to improving UX before data entry. As others have said, there are ways around doing the data entry, but not too many ways around good user design.

Re: Ask HN: Is my project worth pursuing?

#8

Post by rhizome »

dholowiski wrote: post #5
mikeocool wrote: post #4

I like the idea of being able to figure out that beers are brewed near by. But the data entry piece sounds a little arduous for the result. Have you thought about crowd sourcing it? Maybe make localbeer.me a giant google map with all the breweries you've entered so far on it and the have a super simple form that lets people add their local breweries and their beer offerings. I feel like I know some hardcore craft bee…

Yes, see my comment below. Users can already enter breweries/beer. Maybe it's just as simple as making it easier/more obvious.

I suggest a big red button that says "the location i am at is a place that sells beer" and then have a form where people enter a name and can easily associate beer brands with the location.

Re: Ask HN: Is my project worth pursuing?

#10

Post by dholowiski »

tg3 wrote: post #7

I think it does have value, but a few things that struck me as "must dos": - make it better for mobile, since that's likely the platform I'll use in a strange city. Maybe this is part of the graphic design piece that you were talking about. - make it easier to see ALL the breweries/beers near me. I would think that would be the main page instead of one at a time (I hate refreshing the page) If this project was droppe…

Thanks for the feedback. Mobile is a work in progress. Actually I had a working mobile version but it was not very good so I disabled it.

What do you mean, make it easy to see all the breweries near me? It should automatically show you all the breweries in a certain range. Do you mean that you had to increase the range, and didn't like the refresh - and that instead of refreshing I should do it via ajax?

Users can actually add beers, breweries. Since you're the second person to mention that, clearly I need to make it more obvious and easier. I did focus on adding California and New York first, they are very complete. Now I'm thinking I need to focus on my local area, and physically go to the breweries to get their help promoting the site, as you mentioned.

Great feedback. Up until now I have been focusing on data entry, but I do see the need for UX improvement.

I've actually done a couple of Stumble Upon campaigns, they're at least as targeted as Facebook ads, and very cheap. I might have to branch out but it seems a bit crazy paying for visitors when I'm not actually making money on the site.

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